Kansas state Sen. Barbara Bollier is a Republican who has been fighting for years to get her colleagues to agree to expand Medicaid.

For years she pushed against what she described as a “Tea Party-ish” Senate and a governor who wouldn’t consider the issue. In return for her efforts, she was stripped of her committee assignments and sidelined.

But in last November’s election, the makeup of the Kansas legislature moved decidedly to the center. And last week, the state’s Senate joined the House in agreeing to expand eligibility for Medicaid, the government health program for the poor, to about 150,000 more Kansans.

“This has been a long time and a hard road,” Bollier said in an interview shortly after the vote.

The vote had reverberations back in Washington, D.C., because it came just days after Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives failed in their effort